Red Ridge is reference Medfield tablet

We just got some information on the name and specs of Intel’s upcoming Medfield tablet platform and we can continue unwrapping the story of Intel’s next generation mobile chips.

The plan is to launch the first tablets in Q2 2012 and according to current schedule Intel us currently in the alpha stage of development that should end by late March, or end of Q1 2012. In April Intel should be getting to beta and by the middle of Q2 2012 it should be ready to release hardware and software. Of course, this all depends on stability of drivers under Android 4.0, the reference OS.

The reference Red Ridge tablet should be around 8.5 mm thin (0.33-inch), weigh under 1.5 pounds (less than 680 grams), pack a 28Whr battery that should last some 9 plus hours and it will feature a 10-inch 200 nits panel. Intel claims an impressive standby time of more than 30 days which sounds quite great. Intel also claims best in class flash as well as connected standby support.

Before we go any further just remind you that the reference Oak Trail Atom Z670 platform had 6+ hours battery life, was supposed to weigh less than 1.5 pounds, all packed in a sub-15mm chassis, almost twice as much as Red Ridge. It shared the 30-day standby claim.

The reference tablet has 1GB of memory but clock speeds or storage memory configuration have not been disclosed thus far. Since SGX540 is the GPU of choice for Medfield this means that Apple’s A5 ends up much faster when it comes to graphics performance but Intel hopes that its single core can outperform most dual and even some quad-cores, especially in some tasks on modern tablets, i.e. apps that rely on single core performance.

All we can do is wait for the second quarter and see what Intel can do with the Red Ridge platform. With Windows 8 and Intel x86 chips on the way, 2012 promises to be a pretty eventful year for the tablet market.